Not long ago I was having lunch with some of our colleagues who do a lot of transcription work for the courts. Inevitably, the conversation turned into a discussion about the enormous amount of work involved in a transcription/ translation assignment. Although I do not devote much of my professional practice to this interesting and difficult discipline, I have had my share of transcription jobs throughout the years. I know first-hand how demanding and time-consuming a transcription can be.

When an attorney retains you to transcribe a police interview, wiretap, telephone call, or foreign-court testimony, the case starts with the transcriber (Often a translator or a court interpreter) getting a bunch of tapes, CDs, or MP3s. The first step is to figure out how to open the files that contain the audio and video recordings; and as many of you know, this can be hard and frustrating. Once the files are open, the transcriber needs to listen, “clean up”, and listen again, over and over, until she can understand and transcribe everything that was said. This can take an incredibly long time. A rule of thumb for many transcribers is about one hour of work for one minute of recording. Then comes the checking of the transcription work, and finally the translation process begins: translation, proof-reading, review.

By the way, we cannot forget the court testimony, including all the preparation and waiting time at the courthouse. In all: It is a complex, detail-oriented, demanding, and often underappreciated area of our profession.

In my opinion, this type of highly specialized work has to be well remunerated, and I believe that the transcriber must charge differently for the three main aspects of the transcription service: She should charge a professional fee for the time it takes her to transcribe the recordings, a per-word fee for the translation part of the assignment, and then again a professional fee for the time spent in testimony preparation, time waiting around at the courthouse, and time spent on the witness stand. Some colleagues believe that this is way too complicated, and they opt for charging a pre-determined professional fee for the time spent doing the job, all aspects included, without any distinction between transcription and translation work. This first system has always worked for me, but since I do not do as many transcriptions as some of you, I ask you to give us your opinion.

A few weeks ago I was on an airplane getting ready to take off, it was business as usual, a passenger trying to fit an incredibly large bag above the seat, the smell of fries and burgers, the crying babies, and the safety video where they teach us how to buckle a seatbelt. I don’t know why, but I found myself watching the video. It was in English with Spanish subtitles. Of course, you know what happened next: I began to interpret the video in my head.

To my surprise, the translated text had some serious mistakes! Instead of using the Spanish word for buckle (hebilla) it used the Spanish word for lapel (solapa). It literally translated into Spanish the term “water landing” despite the fact that there is a word in Spanish for “water landing” (acuatizaje).

I wondered why the largest airline in the world with all its financial resources would pay for this translation. Then it hit me: The airline probably hired a very well-known translator who did what she believed to be an impeccable job. She probably had it proofread and edited, and after that she probably reviewed it ten more times. The real problem in this case, as it happens a lot with those of us who have been living in a foreign language country for decades, is that we stop thinking in our first language, we adopt grammar, expressions, and bad habits from the foreign language (in this case English) and start translating and interpreting into poor Spanish or any other target language.

It scares me and I try to minimize this tendency by reading newspapers and watching TV and movies from Spanish speaking countries. Never from American publications or networks in “Spanish.” It is not easy. My questions to all of you, regardless of your language pair, are: Do you have this problem? And if you do; Do you have any suggestions to avoid this pollution of the target language?